Quick Tip: Make Your Widgets Shine with Images and Links

Chrissie Pollock is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, where she helps people succeed on their blogging or site-building adventure. This post is adapted from a tutorial she shared on her personal blog.

The Text Widget is a fairly straightforward tool, right? You write a bit of text, and it shows up in your sidebar (or footer, depending on the location of your widget areas). Some of you may have tried to replicate sleek-looking widgets that contain images or links, but when you added a link to your author blurb, or put in an affiliate code and image, all you ended up seeing was a plain web address, the bells and whistles nowhere to be found.

Don’t worry — that’s pretty common! The reason is that you have to use HTML if you want to make it look pretty. This can be daunting if you haven’t tried working with HTML before, but…